


You Were A Kindness

by Kian



Series: Acts of Kindness [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Christmas, Christmas Eve, Fluff, Gen, Holidays, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2014-12-26
Packaged: 2018-03-03 17:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2859350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kian/pseuds/Kian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The room is dark, dark, dark, but warm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Were A Kindness

**Author's Note:**

> Couldn't get to my computer to post this yesterday, so I'm already playing catch-up. Ah well. As ever, un-betaed, so please report any issues to the front desk. 
> 
> Title taken from the song by the same name, by The National. The song is a great Stucky song, though a little darker than this story goes with them. I suppose I imagine it as the background of what they're going through to get to the moment of this fic.

He presses his face against the glass, where it’s wet and cold, a fragile protection from the wind he can hear whistling on the other side.

He rolls his brow against the condensation, gathers the frosty drops like an icy diadem against his overheated skin.

His hair sticks in places, long strands falling into his eyes and shifting subtly, itching in a way that doesn’t itch.

The room is dark, dark, dark, but warm.

Warm like “secure.” Warm like “provided.” Warm like “safe.” Warm like “belonging.”

The man who lives in the room calls it “home.”

He likes that word, “home.”

He thinks about it as he watches the fog of his breath obscure the view the window provides. It seems like a big word. An important one.

He forms the word on his tongue, presses it against the window too, sees how it pushes through the fog of his breath and clears a place on the glass again.

Yes, a _very_ big word. He can feel it shivering up and down his spine, little trickles of warmth firing across his synapses.

The room is not totally dark. There are lights, little ones, too small to do more than cast pleasing little shadows from where they perch in the branches of the tree the man who lives in the room had brought inside a few days before.

The tree smells, but he likes it. Likes how the pungent stink of the tree covers everything in sweet sap and musky pine. It smells warm.

Warm like shelter. Warm like hunger that isn’t hungry. Warm like satisfaction.

Warm like “home.”

He can see the little lights, small and impractical, in the glass out of the corner of his eye. They are not all white light; shaded glass casts hues of pink and purple and green and blue and yellow and red in even softer splotches of light against the wall, the floor, the ceiling, the window where he presses his face.

The fog of his breath blurs the edges of the reflected lights together into a small sea of color, roiling and chaotic and warm.

There are glass sculptures on the tree, hooked and looped into place on the branches, in different shapes and shades. Some are polished and shine like distorted mirrors, while some are matte and are meant to be images of things outside the room. There are animals and bells and socks and geometric patterns and stars. Some have extra parts, made of delicate wood and string and stuffed cloth. Some are hidden deep in the boughs where he has to work to see them, and some are set just at the tips of the branches, light as air and dangerously balanced as though on a knife point. He watches them sway sometimes and likes how tenaciously they grip onto the needles, determined to be seen and determined to endure.

There is a puppet of a woman on the top of the tree, with wings that are too small and weak to carry her. She is poised for flight anyway, her blond hair swept back and her small lips set into a sweet smile while her eyes are turned up and out on visions only she can see. When the man who lives in the room had first set her up there, she had been holding a circle of green leaves and red berries. That circle has since been replaced by others with a delicate glass sculpture, bound carefully into place with glue and wire, that is circles of bright color set within other circles, a small white star in the center.

The man who lived in the room had been grumpy when he’d first noticed the change, but had left it in place when he had said he’d liked it. The little lights make the circular sculpture in the woman’s hands glow and sparkle when he moves around the room. It makes him feel warm, like there is too much air inside of him and he wants to let it all out at once.

The lights also touch the packages the man who lives in the room had set beneath the lowest boughs of the tree he had brought inside, sometimes complimenting the colors of the paper wrappings, sometimes clashing when the hues don’t readily combine.

He likes the way it looks, like it belongs that way. Like it’s warm in a way that doesn’t translate to touch. Warm like “home” and the way the man who lives in the room smiles with only one side of his mouth sometimes. The disparity, the imbalance is satisfactory, but cannot be condensed to a formula or procedure that may be deliberately replicated.

He had moved everything around a few hours ago, making clean lines and sharp angles, matching everything together into groups of like and collecting the colors together to stand in ordered sets.

He hadn’t liked that as much. The warmth had gone missing. He’d moved everything back into the chaotic patchwork it had started in, and then the warmth had come back and he’d liked the room again.

Warm like curved movement. Warm like soft things. Warm like the sound of a plucked string.

Warm like “home.”

The door to the room opens, but he doesn’t turn from the window. In the glass, he can see the silhouette of the man who lives in the room, around the shape of the tree they had brought inside and the packages and the little lights and the fog of his breath.

The man who lives in the room stands still in the dark, breathing even and soft breaths. He likes that. Likes it even better when the man who lives in the room gently says, “Bucky?”

“Bucky” is the word that he is, and there is warmth in the word. Bucky likes that his word is warm like comprehension and warm like being sure and warm like moving his feet.

The man who lives in the room has a word too: “Steve.” Bucky likes that word even better, likes how it is even warmer than his own word. Warm like “home.”

Steve doesn’t turn on the electrical lights from the ceiling, but instead navigates the room between the shadows of the little lights, stepping around the tree carefully to get to where Bucky is tucked in behind it, so he doesn’t jostle the tree’s branches or the little lights or the glass sculptures or the packages. Steve sinks to the floor beside Bucky, the tree at their backs, and crosses his legs, letting his arms drape across his knees, the back of one hand touching Bucky’s thigh.

Bucky pulls his head back from leaning on the glass, looks at Steve. Steve smiles in that crooked way Bucky likes, reaching out and smoothing Bucky’s hair back away from his face.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Steve asks.

Bucky tilts his head, considering. He looks at the tree and the little lights and the glass sculptures and the packages, looks at the dark world on the other side of the glass and at the warm darkness within. He looks at Steve again, where he is patiently waiting for Bucky.

“Didn’t want to,” Bucky says.

Steve smiles, crookedly with the one corner of his mouth. He looks around like Bucky did, and then back again.

He says, “It’s good to be home, isn’t it?”

Bucky nods.

They watch the reflection of the tree and the lights and the packages and the glass sculptures and each other in the window until the light outside returns, pink and new and warm.

“Merry Christmas, Bucky,” Steve says at his side.

Bucky turns to look at him, smiles.

“Merry Christmas, Steve.”

* * *

 

end


End file.
